GENERAL ISSUE SEPT 27 IT
GENERAL ISSUE SEPT 27 IT
;JP; ANPAc..r.. IT-knowledge-acceptance
JP/ /
Tips on gaining knowledge and acceptance
By Onno W. Purbo
JAKARTA (JP): Rapid advances in Information Technology (IT) may revolutionize ways of gaining knowledge and acceptance in the IT professional world.
A shift in mind-set and education curriculum should be made in a short time, or one may seriously be left behind. Rapid advances in technology open up huge IT job opportunities.
For those wishing to find IT jobs in Indonesia, one can simply subscribe to various lowongan (vacancy) mailing lists at yahoogroups.com or lowongan.net to be flooded by 10-20 IT lowongan opportunities daily. Not to mention the daily huge numbers of ads in various newspapers in Jakarta, Singapore and Malaysia seeking IT professionals. Thus, there are too many IT job opportunities with unfortunately too few qualified human resources to fill them.
Unfortunately, most computer science teachers, as well as the national curriculum, seem to be slow in responding to these rapid advances in the IT world. As a simple checklist, is there any formal education for those wishing to learn about PHP, Java Script, WML, C++, SQL, ASP, or BGP Routing? The answer, unfortunately, is no.
An awful state of affairs, due simply to a lack of motivation by educational institutions to keep up with the latest advances in Information Technology as well as requirements by the Indonesian Ministry of Education to follow the ancient national IT curriculum that results in lower accreditation levels. Thus, to be frank, no one can rely on formal education to gain knowledge or acceptance within the IT community or to survive in the real IT world.
In other words, one may unfortunately gain nothing from an expensive formal IT education. This forces one to seek knowledge from other sources to survive. In reality, most IT knowledge is informally obtained among IT practitioners either through discussions, open source CD-ROMs or various types of Internet delivery media.
Job opportunities
Having IT knowledge will open a gateway into a vast field of jobs and opportunities. For example, it is common at various websites for the owners to make available a link to job vacancies in their companies.
Professional C++, web, SQL programmers and network security experts (also known as hackers) may be the most wanted professionals in the IT world. Sadly, none of their knowledge was gained through formal education.
Those professionals are mostly mobile, with laptop at hand and other electronic gadgets, and will have monthly earnings of at least US$500-1000. An income level like that can be reached by those who work hard and acquire a specialized IT skill over a period of two years to four years, based on observation of my students.
The real pro may get away with a couple of US$10,000 project based fees.
Those students who seek high marks in their class will not gain much in the real world. The successful ones are those who strive to unlock IT knowledge beyond what their university can teach them.
IT and the Internet really help in opening up the gateway to a vast pool of applicable new knowledge; those who manage to acquire this knowledge during their school years could easily pass the US$75 monthly salary level aimed at by fresh graduates.
GNU Public License (GPL) at http://www.gnu.org is the key in IT knowledge dissemination in the world today. GNU-type licensing enables one to put the whole source code in the public domain and lets others learn how to perform the art of computing. The copyleft movement is characterized by these sorts of movement; rather than relying on the copyright scheme.
Linux is one of the best examples of the impact of open sources and open knowledge towards the advances of IT development by IT communities worldwide. Open source and open knowledge enables one to tap the state of the art development of the code as well as to learn how the coding is done in real time. All the code can be downloaded from various sites, such as, www.redhat.com, www.mandrake.com, www.freshmeat.org and many other sites.
Knowledge on open sources is written and openly put on the Internet, such as, www.linuxdoc.org, http://pandu.dhs.org, to enable others to tap in to the state-of-the-art knowledge on Linux and open sources. Open lectures and distance learning seems to be much more open in the IT world; a real example is the MIT's lecture notes at: http://web.mit.edu/afs/athena.mit.edu/org/a/acs/www/acaduces2.html or the OpenCourseware initiative at http://web.mit.edu/ocw/.
Those wishing to update on various e-courses via e-mail can visit http://virtual.net.uy/netfree.html. In addition to openly distributed explicit IT knowledge in e-papers and e-book form, one may gain knowledge by actively engaging in various open IT discussion groups on the Internet. Thus,www.yahoogroups.com might be the highest-hit mailing list server on the Internet, one can freely participate in a vast pool of e-mail discussion groups to discuss and solve problems with other experts at distance.
The Indonesian Linux community groups can be easily found in various mailing lists hosted by linux.or.id and can be seen at http://www.linux.or.id. Tacit knowledge is distributed through these mailing list discussion groups. Thus, having this knowledge easily accessible at hand, it is only a question of time to become an expert in the IT world for those who persist in reading and working on the code.
Getting IT knowledge is not sufficient to survive. In the old days, university certificate and degrees from prestigious schools would ensure one could gain public acceptance and consequently a good job. Having an aged national IT curriculum at present, one must learn the hard way and it is an art in itself to gain community acknowledgement and acceptance. In other words, one needs to prove one's specialty skill to the community.
Grade certificates
One of the expensive ways to gain public acceptance is through industrial certificates such as Microsoft's MCP, MCSE, MCT or Cisco's CCNA. Some IT industrial-grade certificates can be obtained online at, http://www.brainbench.com, http://www.cert21.com, http://www.examsimulators.com. Normally, US$100 is needed to get one of these certificates. Well, it is a good investment considering a couple of thousands of dollars monthly income would then potentially be available.
Fortunately, there are alternative, inexpensive ways to gain acknowledgement and acceptance from the communities. One of the easiest ways is actively to answer questions raised in various open Internet mailing lists. Only those who have the knowledge can regularly answer many of these questions. An ability to answer questions should be complemented by actively writing in various IT magazines and, if possible, published books.
Gradually, one will receive acknowledgement from the community. The wider the dissemination of answers, articles and books, the greater the community acceptance that will be received. A consensus among the community will develop regarding one's expertise. At that point, one need not worry about seeking jobs, as jobs will find the best of the best automatically.
It may seem easy to do. With rapidly advancing information technology, gaining the knowledge and acceptance from the community is an art in itself. Unfortunately, in real life, it may take years (at least 3 years to 4 years), consistently sitting in front of a computer connected to the Internet and actively engaged in various Internet-based activities and virtual discussions. Those with persistence and huge self-determination over a long period of time will gain the knowledge and, at the end, survive.
However, survival is not enough, as only those who produce and pass knowledge on to others will occupy the high ground. Fortunately, IT, the Internet and other electronic means enable anyone to efficiently share his knowledge at low cost with others based on copyleft movement -- a snowball effect that, in turn, rapidly speeds up the knowledge cycle.
Ultimately, the old paradigm inherent in a knowledge cycle based on an ancient national curriculum will be replaced by a more efficient knowledge cycle based on a copyleft movement driven by the existence of IT, the Internet and other electronic means.
Community acknowledgement will replace the old-style university degree and certificate. Only those able to produce and share knowledge will occupy the highest positions in a knowledge- based society. A society that should ideally be established for future generations.